When more than 4 people join a call, your call switches to a cloud meeting.

We are big fans of peer-to-peer. Setting up the p2p connections between every person does require bandwidth. So for a larger meeting, your call switches to the cloud. Here's what that means for switching, privacy, and bandwidth:

Peer to peer

From when we first launched, we built on a peer-to-peer architecture where we could. Please read our blog post by Kwin, our CEO and lead dev, which walks through how a p2p call is set up, and how calls with more than 4 participants are switched to the cloud.

We also are glad to send you our more technical white paper. Please email help@daily.co.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is a key issue on a video call — you're exchanging live video. That can be tough. It's even more demanding than, say, watching a movie, which can be buffered. How much bandwidth depends on how many people are in your call. Here's how we've built Daily.co, to help you get the best experience possible:

When 4 or fewer are in your call, your call is p2p, and 200 kbps per connection is required, for a p2p call.

While we like p2p, the bandwidth requirements get onerous with more people on a call. So we switch you to the cloud:

After the switch from p2p to cloud, a Daily.co client only needs 200kb/s upstream in total, no matter how many participants are in the meeting, and needs about 75 kb/s per participant downstream for each participant that is sending video.

So in a 10-participant meeting, you need about 200kb/s upstream and about 750kb/s downstream.

In a 50-participant meeting with everyone sending video, you'd need about 3.5Mb/s.

Privacy

When 4 or fewer people are in a call, because the call is p2p, only the browsers in your call can decrypt the audio and video streams.

When 5 or more people are in a call, the video and audio streams are routed through our servers. The streams are still encrypted, and our code is written in such a way that we do not have access to this data. They are not encrypted end-to-end as they are in a p2p call, to be clear, but they are still fully secure.

The only data we store on our servers is your account data (login/domain) and meeting recording data (number of participants, call duration, etc.). If you are not recording your call, we do not store your video/audio call on our servers. We strictly control access to your account data, following industry best practices.

Please email us at anytime if you'd like more details. We are happy to answer your questions!